Beyond the Model Minority Myth

[THEANGEL&THEGAMBLER]

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/07/chua-changelab-nakagawa-model-minority

I

n his May 2014 commencement speech to Yale’s Asian-American alumni, jazz musician and Harvard professor Vijay Iyer said, “To succeed in America is, somehow, to be complicit with the idea of America — which means that at some level you’ve made peace with its rather ugly past.”

He was referring to the upward mobility of large numbers of Asian Americans, which, he argued, came at the expense of other people of color.

A few months later, this sentiment was echoed by the online forum ChangeLab, which announced a new social media campaign,#ModelMinorityMutiny, designed to identify and reject the insidious construction of Asian Americans as a “good” minority, a designation that has been used as a means to justify and perpetuate racism against blacks in particular.

These statements have been part a growing push among younger Asian Americans to name and decry the participation of Asians as a racial group in white supremacy. This line of inquiry, which has sharpened in the wake of the high-profile, black-led protests against police violence, has so far resulted in several ongoing discussions and at least a few powerful shows of on-the-ground solidarity in the aftermath of Ferguson under the banner #Asians4BlackLives.

By the 1960s, the state was eager to contain the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement and, among other tactics, found a racial foil in the “successful” Asian immigrant, a trope that could be brandished to discredit the movement and attribute blacks’ disenfranchisement to a “culture of poverty.” The infamous Moynihan Report, for instance, credited the “close-knit family structure” of the Japanese and Chinese with their uplift in society, and juxtaposed this with “black matriarchy,” arguing that the latter had been responsible for the entrenchment of blacks in poverty.

In addition to providing crude justification for anti-black racism, such narratives also made it possible for liberals to conveniently dismiss the horrors of internment and Chinese Exclusion. As Wu notes, “Japanese American ‘success stories’ of the mid- to late 1950s redeemed the nation’s missteps and reinforced liberalism’s tenets, especially state management of the racial order.”

Thus, the overlapping desires of both the government and liberal Asian-American advocacy groups to incorporate Asians (albeit in a regulated way) into the body politic produced the narrative of immigrant success that became the model minority myth.

To better explain the position occupied by Asians in the current hierarchy of power, more useful questions to ask might include: Which political structures have enabled certain Asian-American communities to flourish economically, and in which instances has this occurred at the expense of other ethnic and racial groups? How does the “model minority” narrative operate as part of the legacies of colonization, slavery, and immigration that have shaped the racial hierarchy in the US? And how are race and class boundaries in the US currently enforced and upheld?

The contemporary iteration of the model-minority stereotype was sealed into place following the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act, which abolished strict national-origin quotas and instead prioritized family unification, education, and professional skills. Sociologist Jennifer Lee — whose new book The Asian American Achievement Paradox examines this phenomenon in detail — argued recently in Contexts that the Asian immigrants who enter the US are “highly selected, meaning that they are more highly educated than their ethnic counterparts who did not immigrate.”

According to Lee, this hyperselectivity also means that those who are admitted to the US have the capital to create “ethnic institutions such as after-school academies and SAT prep courses” that then become available to working-class co-ethnics, boosting rates of education for the entire group.

Other scholars, such as Tamara Nopper, have focused their attention on how domestic policies, rather than immigration provisions, have aided Asian-origin groups. In an article for Everyday Sociology, Nopper argues that numerous domestic initiatives, such as the White House Commission on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, have provided financial support to Asian immigrant communities that have not been as readily available to other communities of color.

As a result of both the immigrant selection process and domestic policies, Asian Americans currently hold the highest median income and education levels of any race today, with climbing wealth levels projected by the Federal Reserve of St. Louis to overtake those of whites within two decades.

However, to interpret this data as evidence that “race” has caused Asian success, or that Asians have somehow accessed the spoils of white supremacy, is to elide racism and class in a way that misunderstands how the particular racialization of Asians in America augments capitalist restructuring that demands increasing numbers of both knowledge workers and service workers while simultaneously attempting to press the wage floor lower for all.

Terms like “model minority” and even the awkward “honorary whites” by definition construct Asian Americans as “not (quite) white” even as they position the group on the advantaged end of people of color. Therefore, it is not that Asians are being assimilated into whiteness — as various commentators have argued for years — but rather, that they are being assimilated into an evolving formulation of “not black”-ness.

 

[AJaRuleStan]

I'm not sure what the overall point that the article is trying to make in regards to Asians and "White supremacy"; However, I must say this, ppl don't reference Asian Americans academic and economic achievement to justify racism, they reference it to disprove the claim that minorities are incapable of success in America. To argue that this is a racist point to make is like arguing that it is racist for a speaker to provide hard evidence for his argument, which would be absurd.